Meet the Crazy Rich Russians living in London now

From Ascot to Annabel’s, Henley to Harrods, they are the new generation of Russian-born, UK raised ‘little tsars’ adding their unique brand of glitz to British high society. As relations with the Kremlin turn cold, Francesca Carington meets the Moscovite millennials studying, partying and playing ‘mafia’ in Mayfair

Unlike the British upper classes, whose reign was last interrupted in 1066, there are no old, rich Russian families. Lenin and friends took care of that. But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a group of savvy (though not always savoury) business magnates found themselves in possession of enormous riches. They looked west, to the world’s financial capital – and London’s politicians welcomed them and their wallets with open arms. Tony Blair attended the opera in St Petersburg as Putin’s guest in 2000, and things got even sweeter in 2008, with the introduction of the Tier 1 investor visa (or ‘golden visa’), allowing successful applicants to reside in the UK in exchange for an investment of £1 million (now £2 million) in government bonds. What happened next – or at least the accepted version of it – is familiar to every Londoner: Russians bought swathes of property in Knightsbridge, football clubs and yachts, they shopped on Sloane Street with their bodyguards, bombed through Chelsea in blacked-out Range Rovers; they were flashy, gauche and worst of all, nouveau.

But what of their children? Born after the fall of the USSR and brought up in Britain’s boarding schools, the second generation of rich Russians has come of age. Where the parents may have been seen as parvenus, the progeny are unambiguously accepted as mainstays of high society – they decorate the pages of Bystanders both British and Russian, they’re regulars at Henley, Ascot and Annabel’s. And with them, we are witnessing the assimilation of another layer in the puff pastry of the British upper crust.

But just when it was all going so well, 2018 saw Anglo-Russian relations grow frosty, to say the least. The poisoning in Salisbury of former spy Sergei Skripal and attempts by the British government to curtail Kremlin influence in the UK have brought London’s rich Russians into sharper focus. There was the introduction of unexplained wealth orders, which proved a problem for one Harrods-loving Azerbaijani (Zamira Hajiyeva, who blew £16 million at the store despite her husband’s official salary between 2001 and 2008 being £54,000) and now a Home Office review on golden visas may be the undoing of still more. Are the Russians deserting us? In June, Roman Abramovich withdrew his British visa renewal application – and it is thought that problems with visas led to the cancellation of this winter’s Russian Debutante Ball, an event that attracts daughters of the super-rich to Grosvenor House hotel in flouncing white dresses and tiaras. What are we to make of it all? And what of the bright young Russians with roots in two conflicting countries stuck in the middle?

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As a social set, they are glamorous, wealthy, hard-working and curiously discreet. A British upbringing means that they are cultural chameleons, fixtures of both the British season and its exclusive Russian counterpart: a shimmering world of mega-weddings and costume balls glimpsed only by the rest of us in Russian Tatler – or out-of-focus images on the Mail Online. A scroll through Instagram shows Anglo-Russians at louche parties in Moscow one week and genteel days out at Goodwood the next. And there they are on private planes, making peace signs outside the Kremlin, shooting in Gloucestershire, or with their Chanel handbags and sunglasses on rooftop pools overlooking the London skyline.

And so it falls to Tatler to investigate, tracking down a sample of young rich Russians at the heart of the London scene. They may revel in online ostentation but on meeting this group in real life, it becomes quickly apparent that, in person, they’re more low-key than you’d expect. Flashiness is (almost) frowned upon. After all, new money needs to be seen to demonstrate its very existence, but old money has nothing to prove. These Russians are somewhere in between the two – they’ve graduated from the kind of wealth embodied by a glittery red Ferrari parked outside Harrods with multiple parking tickets on its windscreen, but haven’t quite made it to the bracket of owning half a county but reusing cling film, as is customary among Britain’s oldest families.

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The first Russian I meet is Anna Milyavskaya, 22, the daughter of an actress and a businessman. (When I ask what business, she seems reluctant to clarify: ‘I can’t really say.’) Anna is extremely pretty, with long, straight hair, glossed lips and dressed from baseball cap to Balenciaga trainers in black athleisure. The only pop of colour is her azure Hermès bag. We meet at one of her favourite cafés in Mayfair, where she lives, which caters to an international crowd: on one side of us, Russians talk Fashion Week, while a group of Indian girls on the other eavesdrop on our conversation.

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Anna says she has felt anti-Russian sentiment in London. She was with her mother in Mayfair, withdrawing money. ‘It was winter and I was wearing a chinchilla coat. There was a guy behind me – he was Indian or something – I was talking in Russian and he started swearing at me, “You f**king Russian bitch in your fake jacket, move away, everyone hates you in this country, no one wants you here, you’re immigrants, go back to your country.” And my mum turns around and says, “You, too!”’ She laughs, but the experience clearly left her shaken – not least because the man assumed her chinchilla coat was fake. ‘How can you judge a person like that?’ she asks. ‘It doesn’t matter what language you speak, you just have to respect people.’

Anna was brought up in Rublyovka, a self-contained enclave outside of Moscow, where ‘famous, wealthy and well-known families’ live in vast houses. Its most famous resident is Vladimir Putin. ‘I always felt like [its name] comes from the word roubles, which is like money,’ says Anna – and those who live there have plenty of it. ‘I guess for some people I may be a bit spoiled,’ she says, her accent a Moscow-Cali mash-up. ‘My parents never went over the top with me and they wouldn’t let me do some stuff, because they wanted me to experience, like, life.’

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When she was 14, Anna announced to her family that she wanted to go to boarding school in England. ‘I was feeling a bit trapped and I wanted to experience something more myself. I didn’t want everything to be given to me on a plate,’ she says. So she traded the mega-mansions of Rublyovka for the Palladian delights of Buckinghamshire’s Stowe. It took her some time to adjust to dorms, shared bathrooms, chapel every day and ‘small, small wardrobes. I had so many clothes that at first I panicked.’ Her English wasn’t great either, but improved as she made English friends. Once she felt she had mastered the language, she started to befriend fellow Anglo-Russians.

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‘There is a Russian community. When I lived in Belgravia, every second person was Russian. Sometimes you’d be like, “Am I in Moscow or am I in London?”’ Her mother adores London and is often here, and has her own set of Russian friends, whose children all know each other. When Anna first started university, she was really into the Russian scene, which seems to make the most of its stereotypes by, among other things, organising games of ‘mafia’. ‘I love playing mafia,’ she says. (Not, alas, the organised crime ring, but a sophisticated version of wink murder.)

Other things Anna loves include: Regent’s Park, countries where you get a spiritual experience, ceviche, Selfridges, Louboutin slippers, and, most of all, ‘I love, love, love parties where you need to have a dress code.’ All of which give a fleeting impression of her life in London, where she’s doing a Masters in international business at Regent’s College (where she also did her BA, in media and communications).

Nights out are almost exclusively local to her – this means Cirque Le Soir, Toy Room and sometimes Tramp. Anna worries that Cirque is over with her crowd now – she used to go there so much it was like ‘a second home’. But recently, things have changed. ‘At some point all my Russian classmates were in London. So I had a lot of fun. But a lot of them left. They graduated and took on the family business. That’s usually how it works,’ she says sadly.

Indeed, for some Russians it seems that Britain is the perfect place to attend a good school, meet the right people, and then return home. Philipp Gazmanov is one such example. He was sent to boarding school at New Hall School, then Hurtwood House and moved back to Moscow two years ago, aged 19, to start his own business. He comes to London whenever he can, though. He FaceTimes me from Grozny in Chechnya, where he’s attending the 200th anniversary commemoration of the city. He’s clean-cut and handsome, with perky hair and very good skin, which I’m able to admire as his phone’s angle leaves me looking slightly up at his chin. His father is Oleg Gazmanov, a famous pop singer in Russia, but Phil is refreshingly unentitled. ‘I’m not really the type of guy who had everything when he was young and then is saying, “Oh, because I was famous I didn’t have my personal space,”’ he says, in excellent English with a strong Russian accent. ‘I think it’s very hypocritical to say that.’

Schools in Russia are very good, he says, but his parents chose to send him to the UK, where ‘education has its own brand’. Indeed, all the Russians I speak to allude to the prestige of British public schools. Phil speaks about school in business terms: ‘It’s like this market of people where you have to position yourself as an individual.’ After school he studied art at Central Saint Martins, but left three months into his degree when he got funding for his company, which he describes as ‘Uber for trucks’.

Still, he misses London. ‘What I like is that there are secret clubs and societies, restaurants where only certain people can go.’ I press him for names, but he demurs, saying, ‘There is a reason they stay secret.’ Some of his London friends have country houses, and he’s discreet about what they get up to there, too. Lots of good parties? He smiles, taps his finger to his nose and says, ‘No.’

Churchill famously said Russia was ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’, and if Phil is prone to the odd opacity, he embraces British mores enthusiastically. He enjoys rugby – ‘a gentleman’s sport, a high society sport’ – and shooting clays, at which he is ‘very good’. This blends curiously with his other passions: mixed martial arts, wrestling, jujitsu and shooting machine guns, which he’s about to do in Grozny. This performative manliness seems stereotypically Russian (one thinks of Putin’s action-man PR shots), but his other great hobby is drawing, which, he points out with a shrug, ‘is not very manly.’

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Phil might come back to England often, but for some Russians there is a sense of nervousness about visiting the UK, world-famous though its ­cathedral spires may be. When I ask ­Anastasia Malakhova whether tensions between the Kremlin and Westminster have given her cause for concern, she replies, ‘People talk about it a lot in Russia. One of my friends asked me whether she should come to London on holiday and she was afraid about the tension.’ And what of the visa situation? ‘I think it’s fine. If you’re not on a Kremlin list, it’s fine,’ she laughs.

Anastasia’s family moved from Moscow to London when she was 14, and she went to Harrodian, she tells me over £3 cups of tea in a café at Somerset House. She is 21, has honey-coloured hair, a soft accent and is dressed in black jeans and a leather jacket. She’s in her final year studying mathematics, finance and management at King’s and plans to do a Masters, then work in investment banking (According to her parents’ assistant, who set up our meeting, she’s something of a maths whizz and has won several prizes, though Anastasia is modestly vague about that.)

She’s less of a fixture on the Russian social scene than the others – partly due to the intensity of her degree. Most of her friends from Moscow are in London, and most are as assimilated as her: ‘I think they became quite British in a way as well, because we’ve been living here so long that for us it doesn’t matter who we socialise with.’ She likes to hang out with other Europeans, too, but there is one occasion when socialising as a Russian set is unavoidable – during the summer. Along with most fashionable Russians, Anastasia’s family go to the Tuscan seaside town of Forte dei Marmi every year. Two other Russians I speak to (cousins Sasha Ignatiev, 21, and Vladimir Ignatyev, 19 – their families opted for different surname spellings of the Cyrillic) are regulars, too. They note that there are only a couple of nightclubs there, so when you go you know everyone.

Other stops on the Russian summer safari include the three Ms – Marbella, Monaco and Mykonos – plus Saint Tropez and Ibiza. (In the winter, it’s skiing in St Moritz, Gstaad and Courchevel.) I ask if people really tend to go to the same places: ‘One hundred per cent,’ says Sasha. ‘Even if I don’t plan a holiday with my friends, I know that they’ll be there,’ says Anna.

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Sasha and Vlad discuss the holiday habits of their compatriots sitting on the sunny terrace at the Queen’s Club, where Sasha, who is a member, suggested we meet. Vlad, currently in his first year of a law degree at Royal Holloway, recently launched a streetwear line called Six of London, though today he’s dressed in an overcoat and a pink shirt, smoking – appropriately – Black Russians. Sasha is in his final year at King’s, where he’s studying French and management. Smiley and slightly wolfish-looking, he wears slim jeans and a D&G shirt with blue cuffs. He vapes surreptitiously. Sasha is, in fact, half-British – his father married an English woman and moved to the UK, where Sasha was born and raised. ‘My father really likes English things,’ says Sasha, who puts on a Russian accent each time he imitates him. ‘He loves Ascot. That’s probably his favourite thing, even though it’s so English.’ The family lives in South Kensington and Sasha’s upbringing was very traditional, meaning boarding school at seven and exeats at their country house in Kent – which Sasha’s father later demolished and transformed into a Russian dacha, complete with sauna, ice-cold plunge pool, bearskins and taxidermied reindeer heads. ‘I guess even if you move to different places, you still want to bring your heritage with you,’ says Vlad.

Their fathers, who are brothers, are ‘big businessmen’, working in tourism. (Except for Phil, everyone I speak to says their father is a businessman, but most are vague about what that business entails.) The brothers shrewdly capitalised on new travel opportunities between Russia and Britain in the early Nineties and their business acumen has clearly rubbed off on their sons: ‘We’ll probably end up being businessmen, too,’ says Vlad.

Vlad, who is completely Russian, lived in Moscow, where his parents still have a home, until he was 13, then was sent to boarding school in England, following in Sasha’s footsteps at Wellesley and then King’s Canterbury. Six of London began as a hobby in his final year and he opened a pop-up shop in Fitzrovia the summer after graduating. ‘The casual look is really popular,’ he says. ‘And to me that was really interesting because now streetwear can be as cool as wearing an incredibly expensive designer piece.’

While it’s perfectly cool to not spend big money in the Russian crowd, it hasn’t gone completely out of style. A friend of Vlad’s once threw down £11,000 in one night, and when he and Sasha go out with their Russian friends, they rarely stray from Mayfair. Their usual circuit is similar to Anna’s (Sasha knows her and notes that she’s very pretty): Sumosan Twiga, Mnky Hse, Tape, Charlie, Toy Roof (the exclusive shisha bar – young Arabs and Russians are equally into shisha these days), Scandal, ‘which used to be Project. It’s weird because it’s all the same places, but they do them up and everyone’s like, “Oh, it’s a new club, let’s go spend my money!”’ jokes Sasha. One such ‘new’ club is, of course, Annabel’s. ‘You wouldn’t want to go anywhere else,’ says Sasha. ‘You’ve got food, drinks, the rooftop. The interior is beautiful, beautiful women, great service, central…’ Vlad cuts in: ‘Are you done?’

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Both Sasha and Vlad differentiate their Russian friends from their British ones. ‘Russians prefer rap music, songs that we know. My English crowd prefer techno,’ says Vlad. So a night out with his school friends would more likely see him in South London (where they might spot Anastasia, who likes EDM). He and Sasha are as fluent in the ways of the public-school Peckham set as the super-rich Russians. ‘I have two sets of friends,’ says Sasha. ‘You can’t mix them. They just don’t.’ Why? ‘The British would find the Russians very rude,’ he laughs. Sasha and Vlad are, like all the Russians I speak to, incredibly well-mannered, so his comment comes as a surprise. However, in her book Rich Russians, Elisabeth Schimpfössl devotes a whole section to ‘Being Difficult as a Marker of Superiority’. Make of that what you will.

Sasha and Vlad haven’t noticed people treating them differently, aside from ‘the classic mafia joke,’ says Sasha. ‘And every third Uber I get into they’re like, “Ah, Vladimir, like Putin!”’ adds Vlad. He grows serious though: ‘It’s a lot easier for us to see both sides, whereas people you have in power both here and in Russia have older views, post-Cold War views. That’s what’s so difficult to negotiate. Because I don’t think there are enough people that actually have the experience on both sides.’ He believes British-educated Russians like him are in a unique position to salvage relations between the two countries. ‘We have Russian heritage and we’re integrated into English society. So we can connect the bridge in the future, maybe.’

Which brings us to the other surprising feature of this generation of Russians – how very self-aware they are. Vlad, Sasha, Anastasia, Phil and Anna are all conscious that their experiences are not those of every Russian – or British – person. ‘Not everyone is filthy rich,’ says Anna of the other Russians she knows. ‘Some people are so humble, some of them worked really hard and already earned their own money, which I really respect.’ What’s more, as Vlad says, ‘we are different from our parents. We’re more integrated.’ Unmistakably part of the British upper classes and absolved of the need to scale the social ladder by conspicuously throwing money around, this new generation are able to acknowledge just how fortunate they are. ‘Occasionally, sure, you have some assholes’, says Vlad. ‘But otherwise most of us are just regular people.’